Gum-covered bus rides. Fingers stained Bomb Pop red. Billabong swim trunks clinging to two still-growing legs. This is what “Clarity”—Zedd’s iconic 2012 pop banger—means to me. When Ice Spice samples it on her song “No Clarity,” one of her first songs to gain traction, pop becomes a signifier: ...
“Draaaaake?...Aubrey Graham in a wheelchair?”
Tears well up in my eyes the instant the plate hits the ground. It shatters on the kitchen floor beneath me, its pearly ceramic fragments blending in almost seamlessly with the tile. I’m six years old, and my dinner plate has slipped out of my small hands en route to the dishwasher. My dad picks me ...
I think everyone has their own form of synesthesia. I have a friend who sees a number whenever they think of or interact with a person—odd numbers mean different things from even, and a person who is a four is entirely different from a person who is a forty.
The annoying, prodding question galavanting across every purchase: What does it mean to be fashionable? It is a question unanswerable, too subjective to even approach. Yet a thousand different corners have thrown a thousand different hats in the ring.
People think I have an older brother.
“The End of the World was a nightclub... The End of the World was loud. The End of the World leaked music like radiation, and we loved the neon echo, even though it taunted us or maybe because it taunted us…”
The holiday season approaches! And with it, (at least for me) comes the stress of gift giving. Giving gifts to humans is hard, so why not put it off by thinking about what to gift your dog? Don’t have a dog? No worries! Feel free to use these gift ideas for a little brother or a friend with a sense ...
Coming into college, I expected my education to be intellectually demanding, but I was not prepared for it to be, to an equal extent, emotionally stimulating. In my first semester, I took a comparative literature class with Professor Arnold Weinstein. Learning about Freudian complexes and literary traditions, ...
We were “duped”—it was “trickery”—we had fallen right into “a trap.” Who, you might ask, was the agent of this malevolent manipulation? A dating app catfisher? The con artist at the top of a pyramid scheme? No. According to a number of critics (and audience members who took to Twitter) ...
I go down to the small cemetery by the edge of the river. Everything shines—there is no darkness here. The headstones persist in spite of what they know. They keep themselves up, pushing against that knowing which pulls them down, down. One stone is laid with a coquettish flower-crown, the next with ...
Maybe Laurie should die.
A friend once told me that he thinks Californians grow up thinking life is easy because they don’t have to deal with bad weather. He’s not entirely wrong: At home, the seasons melt into each other almost unnoticed—the sun shifts its shade, the wind picks up a chill, suddenly it’s dark at 4 p.m. ...
The end of daylight savings is here. Nights come earlier and days will soon be overcast. That is to say, light will be a scarce resource. We’re all poorly adapted to see in the dark and prone to vitamin D deficiencies. So it’s the time to get creative and embrace sun alternatives—it’s lamp season. ...
Solutions by The State News
